LIFE SENTENCE
            
             The father in Ethan Coen's short story, "The Boys", is a man dealing with serious depression. The conflicts in his life have consumed him and he has lost control, a position that his desperately craves. At the midpoint of his years and stranded in a no-man's-land between his conscience and his trying boys, the father struggles to regain the upper hand on his routine called life. Passages throughout the story reveal the fathers mindset and develop his character into a man on the verge of an epiphany or perhaps a nervous breakdown. Either he will remain the doer of mind-numbing chores and pointless requests of his boys or he will admirably regain command in a life that was his to begin with.
             The relationship between the father and his sons seems to be merely a superficial charade. There is no love from the father towards his boys and the boys lack a sense of patriarchal respect. Perhaps neither is deserved. The father sees his children an "inconvenience" and an embarrassment. The public tantrums and socially retarded behaviour of the boys is reflected on him as a "boorish parent". Their behaviour causes the father's "muscles to knot" and he constantly battles a cyclic migraine. At times the father's patience wears thin and he has the urge to "strike" his children. His frustration builds and he realizes that his faults as a father have resulted in the boys' defects, "the one a suck-ass, the other a mute." In an anger swelled consideration the father concludes that the world "would make losers of them both." and he asks himself "why should disappointment be propagated through another generation, a cruel snap traveling down an endless rope?"
             Complimenting the conflict between the father and his boys is the father's conflict with himself. The father's lack of control over his children and his day-to-day t...